April, 2023 from Press 53
THE BOOK OF JOHN
Praise for The Book of John
Lindsey Royce has given us a beautifully observed book of love and remembrance, loss and endurance. You will be moved. You might even be changed. It is shining with life.
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
In her finely wrought and emotionally gripping collection The Book of John, Lindsey Royce asks where we carry the dead, and her answers through the deep questioning of these pitch-perfect poems at once broke my heart and healed it. The speaker asks her beloved through the veil, “Let me solve / the puzzle of where you are, bring you / back to me for one more night,” and the magic of this collection responds with a resounding yes. Compassionate, compelling, at turns incisive with righteous and understandable anger, and, ultimately, redeeming and filled to the core with love, Royce’s collection asks us to cherish what we may have unintentionally taken for granted. This book is vulnerable and honest and Royce’s poetic craft at its sharpest, wisest, and most empathetic. Read this book and be transformed.
—Jenn Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal and River Woman, River Demon
Lindsey Royce’s The Book of John is a full-throated argument with and indictment of the father god of Christian teachings. As cancer eats away and ultimately kills her husband John, Royce bravely expresses her fear and anger, interrogating the masculine constructs of the divine and its influence on the military and her veteran beloved. She trusts herself to embrace her critique along with her faith that the spirit world dwells somewhere, her thrill in her Marine’s sexiness, and his gourmet meat and potatoes cooking. God’s absence, God’s withholding of nurturance, and God’s failure to intervene for the dying who suffer and starve leads her to question “if a Godthing with mercy even exists.” Concurrent with this “smart misery” is erotic joy, connection, resilience, grace, humor, and delight. She takes up the mantle of priestess, feeder of souls, guiding us into the liminal space where the living and dead meet. This is poetry that touches and transports, which is what we expect from the art; the difference in The Book of John is the generosity with which the poet nourishes our creativity, inspiring us to sing—renewed!—in our own voices. Lindsey Royce serves us our communion feast with her sublime poetry, inviting us, “Break bread with me then— / Make merry, drink my wine.”
—Aliki Barnstone, author of Dwelling and former Poet Laureate of Missouri (2016-2019)
October, 2019 from Press 53
PLAY ME A REVOLUTION
Praise for Play Me A Revolution
Play Me a Revolution will surprise you in many ways, and its powerful use of language will leave you in awe. Throughout these pages, there is the presence of language that grips you, holds you, surprises; the power of language to take you into deep places where love refuses and rejects you even while holding on to you. Royce does not shy from the painful, whether that pain is from the politics of our lives or whether that pain is the beauty of nature that can violently toss kayakers “to lethal rocks below.”
—Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, author of Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems (read full blurb)
Whitmanesque in its scope, Dickinsonian in its attention to detail, Play Me a Revolution is the pair of eyes our era needs. This new collection by Lindsey Royce, unflinching in its commitment to truth, does not look away from even the most difficult topics. Whether addressing the suffering of animals, intimate partner violence, or societal ills, Royce approaches her poetic themes with a porous intelligence so finely tuned that it allows us to focus on topics we may have been reluctant to explore without her compassionate attention. This collection is a gritty beauty filled with all the difficulty and complexity of life—beauty that, arising often from sorrow and pain, breaks us open the same way an act of kindness breaks us open in the middle of a war.
—Melissa Studdard, author of I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast and Dear Selection Committee
Play Me a Revolution is a collection that gives an entirely new meaning to the term “Poetic Justice.” This book examines the essential truths of living in our world today. Lindsey Royce is not afraid to take a deeper look at issues of war, race, human suffering, immigration, and gun violence. The poet examines these difficult issues with grace and eloquence. This collection takes the reader to the sensual sea, a bus ride, the Tao of wheat and the strawberry moon solstice. As Wendell Berry states “there are no unsacred places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” This poet takes the reader to the sacred places, and beyond. Even while delving into the desecrated places, the poems here let us know there is “heartache in one hand, in the other, hope.” One will return to these pages as a spiritual salve. We will kneel to what makes us human and “the luck of each cosmic note that holds us.”
—Connie Post, Poet Laureate Emerita of Livermore, CA (2005–2009), and author of Floodwater, winner of the 2014 Lyrebird Award
BARE HANDS
September, 2016 from Word Tech
Praise for Bare Hands
From Zeus to Athena, from Lear to Cordelia, from Freud to Anna, the sparks between powerful fathers and brilliant daughters have provoked explosions. This mythic electricity drives the poems of Lindsey Royce in her striking first book, Bare Hands. With technical verve (and sheer nerve), Royce writes of a variety of intense relationships—familial and otherwise. She almost seems to lasso her subjects and keep them, with deft twists of prosody, in the bold view of her eye. A latter day Romantic in boots, Royce is both vulnerable and hard-observing, her images visceral and memorable. Bare Hands is a virtuoso debut.
—Molly Peacock
Lindsey Royce hammers out into bright bronze the instruments of childhood torture in this fierce collection. But she's not a victim. She gets the last word in and with these fine poems we see the ascendancy of spirit. Not light reading, this book will burn along your nerves for days after.
—Doug Anderson
Much in the fiery spirit of Cynthia Macdonald's "Two Brothers in a Field of Absence" or Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Lindsey Royce's "Bare Hands" explores personal and social injustices through the eyes of a daughter caught in bruising family dynamics. At first, there is vigilant defense; and then, prayers for escape open into self-possession and poetry.
—Scott Hightower
Lindsey Royce’s dynamic debut book of poems, BARE HANDS, is bold, out-spoken, and beautifully-crafted, an alchemy that turns the leaden pain of growing up in an abusive family to art of the first rank. Like her poetic ancestors, Sharon Olds and Sylvia Plath, Royce pulls back the thick oak front door of her family’s well-appointed upper middle class home, allowing us in on a plethora of ugly secrets. This family that seems to live the American Dream is controlled by a foul-mouthed bully of a father, who imprisons his children in an atmosphere of fear, a fear exacerbated by a mother concerned with the image she projects to her wealthy friends. In poems employing startling and memorable imagery, Royce confronts brutal memories to create her own identity, power and compassion. This collection will enlarge the scope of your own heart.
—Pam Uschuk